Escape To L.A.

The NFL appears to be very aggressive in their efforts to bring a football team back to Los Angeles, the second largest metropolitan area in the United States. Football was the first professional sport to travel past the Mississippi River after World War II, and had been part of the league up until 1994. That year, Los Angeles not only lost the Rams to St. Louis, but the Raiders to Oakland, who originally had the club up until 1981.

The three teams in line to call Los Angeles their home already have at one point in their history or another, oddly enough. Along with the Rams and the Raiders, the San Diego Chargers played their initial season in 1960 at the old Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before heading a little farther south. Oakland’s first move to Los Angeles was resolved in the courts in 1982 after then commissioner Pete Rozelle and fellow NFL owners attempted to block Raiders owner Al Davis from leaving. Thirty-four years later, the NFL now seems to be an agent in bring back football to the City of Angels.

It is a shame that the league so badly wants a team in Los Angeles, a city that every team clamoring to go there once rejected, that they’d be willing to disenfranchise a smaller cities (two of whom, Oakland and St. Louis, already losing a team once) in order to do it. There is plenty of talent in professional football (and young men who play college football) to add a couple of more teams via expansion, but the league seems to be in love with its alignment of four teams in four divisions in two conferences.

But as I’ve pointed out often in this blog, the NFL often does what it wants to do, and will do so until fans do the least likely thing: lose interest in the games by stop attending and stop watching.